Pricing Comparison of Commercial AI Image Generators for the Web
Current as of April 2, 2023
Note: The “prompt pricing” column in the table below is a number I calculated from the data from each subscription plan to make it easier to compare pricing across plans. Most plans are specified in terms of credits and images per credits and it’s hard to compare their value across plans. I did not include all the credit and image numbers in the table to keep it simple. To see the platforms’ pricing in their own terms, see the URLs in the table. (Table is rendered as graphic because substack does not support native tables).
If you see any mistakes I’ve made, please note them in the comments and I’ll correct them asap!
The plans are sorted from least expensive to most. Where monthly pricing was cheaper based on an annual subscription, I chose the annual subscription monthly pricing.
Note that platforms should be evaluated not just based on what they cost in fees, but in what features you get for the money. For example, only some platforms allow you to create your own training models. Only some platforms support what DALL-E 2 calls in-painting and out-painting, and of those that do support these features, some implementations are better than others. Only one model (Stable Diffusion) is open source. Ultimately, people will choose the platform(s) that render images and supports workflows that meet their requirements, not the platform that is the cheapest price.
The pricing and terms in this table is accurate as of April 2, but will probably age quickly.
* Dream Studio and Leonardo’s numbers assume you leave all settings at their default. If you change the default settings to increase size/quality, each prompt becomes more expensive so the total # of prompts per subscription cost will go down. See their pricing links for details.
**Leonardo shows you get 250 tokens for free that are refreshed every two hours (each prompt consumes 4 tokens). But its pricing page says you get 150 fast generations per day for a free account. I’m not sure how the 150 fast generations relates to the 250 free tokens, which refresh every 2 hours. Maybe the first 150 of the n number of refreshed 250 tokens for image generation are fast generation and the rest are slow?
DALL-E 2 and Dream Studio do not charge monthly. They charge per every n images produced (460 for DALL-E 2, ~5,000 for Dream Studio).
Platforms Without Announced Pricing in Beta or Not Yet Released
Adobe Firefly (in private beta)
Image Creator from Microsoft Bing (in private beta, powered by DALL-E 2)
Google Imagen (not released)
Google Parti (not released)
Stable Diffusion
Note that Stable Diffusion is not listed by name in the platforms. Beta.dreamstudio.ai is Stability.AI’s web user interface for Stable Diffusion. I did not call their platform Stable Diffusion in the table because Stability.AI does not call it Stable Diffusion, even though behind Dream Studio is Stable Diffusion.
Stable Diffusion is an open source text to imaging model on which various commercial and free services are built, including Dream Studio.
Besides the numerous commercial frontends to Stable Diffusion, there are also open source implementations of Stable Diffusion that allow people to use it for free, from downloading it on to your desktop computer so you can run it for free to running it via a google colab or via huggingfaces.co for a fee. I need to write a separate post just on the Stable Diffusion ecosystem.
List Not Comprehensive
Everytime I turn around there is another service! I just saw one advertised on Facebook where there is a single pricing model–a single lifetime fee of $227 (artspace.ai).